Concert: TRANSIENT FRAGMENTS

Departure Duo & Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn explore the profundity of fragmentation. . . .

Soprano Nina Guo and bassist Edward Kass (Departure Duo) will join trombonist Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn to present a program exploring the elusive profundity of fragmentation. These disparate pieces all share a love for the fleeting, for the ephemeral interaction of instruments, listeners, and spaces. They present the audience with a series of strange and ethereal tableaux, mixing introspection and confrontation. The varied works on this program will ultimately allow these three seemingly incompatible instruments to both amplify and subvert one another, producing new composite musical bodies equally fantastical and imaginative.

Program:

Hanna Eimermacher: aber unter uns bewegte sich Alles

Chikako Morishita: Skin, Gelatin, Soot mvt. 1

Haukur Þór Harðarson: Poems for the Fire

Iván Naranjo: ot murd, wol fup

Gilles Shuehmacher: Roses

Santiago Díez-Fischer: Neues werk (World Premiere)

György Kurtág: selections from Einige Sätze aus den Sudelbüchern Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs

Musician Bios:

Photo: Kate Nottage

Departure Duo is a soprano and double bass duo comprised of Nina Guo and Edward Kass. Committed to performing repertoire written specifically for soprano+double bass, the duo seeks to show the incredible variety of styles and sounds possible through their combination. Departure Duo firmly believes that contemporary music can and should be accessible to all, and by encouraging dialogue with audiences, new music will not be viewed as a niche genre.

Departure Duo regularly tours and performs recitals, and recent highlights include Spoleto Festival USA, a Yellow Barn artist residency, Center for New Music (San Francisco), Indexical (Santa Cruz), Omaha Under the Radar, Jordan Hall, and KM28 (Berlin). As individuals, Nina and Edward have appeared with contemporary music groups including Ensemble Dal Niente, Ensemble Modern, ensemble ascolta, Callithumpian Consort, Wet Ink, and Decoder, and at festivals around the world such as the Tanglewood Music Center, Lucerne Festival, Achtbrücken (Cologne), SICPP (Boston), the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, and Pacific Music Festival (Japan).

The duo’s long-term project, "30 by '30," aims to catalog 30 hours of soprano+double bass music by 2030. The approach is twofold: commissioning+premiering new works and researching pre-existing ones. Departure Duo frequently collaborates with living composers to create new music for their “high-low” partnership and, since 2015, has brought over a dozen works to life, including three of the pieces on their 2022 debut album Immensity Of on New Focus Recordings. Their commissioning work has received support and recognition from Chamber Music America's Classical Commissioning Grant Program and New England Conservatory's Entrepreneurial Musicianship Department. On the research front, Departure Duo maintains the “30 by '30” database, which has over 22 hours of cataloged repertoire and is a freely accessible resource for anyone interested in soprano+double bass. The goal of “30 by ‘30” is to show that soprano+double bass music is an undeniable body of repertoire, one that is both musically viable and extremely diverse. The duo wants to recognize the whole community that makes up this high-low corner of the musical universe and encourage more people to join.

Foto: Felix Kubitza

Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn is a performer, sound artist, and scholar based in Berlin and working around the edges of installation, improvisation, composition, and craftsmanship. He is a regular guest of the premiere new music ensembles of the world, such as Klangforum Wien and Talea Ensemble, with whom he performs at preeminent festivals and concert halls worldwide. He is also a founding member of experimental chamber music groups hoodwink (with Winnie Huang), Blechtrommel (with Joao Carlos Pacheco), and les Trombones de Bale. As an accomplished instrument builder, he performs concerts and builds installations using a variety of instruments of his own design and construction. He publishes about sound studies, artistic research, and musicology, and has given masterclasses and lectures throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. His recent book, dis/cord: Thinking Sound through Agential Realism, was published in 2022 by Punctum Books.

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